Kelly McParland: Romney is the better bet

Full Comment columnists Jonathan Kay, John Moore and Kelly McParland, having closely followed the U.S. presidential race, stake out their positions in advance of Tuesday’s vote.

Nobody is going to vote for Mitt Romney thinking he’s a godsend for America.

His own party only selected him as nominee because the alternative candidates were clearly worse. Many in the Tea Party would still happily reverse the order on the GOP ticket and put Paul Ryan in the presidential slot. Romney’s lure to independents is pallid at best: he’s no Reagan, but he seems unlikely to prove as disappointing as George W. Bush.

Which is the basis on which I’d vote for him if I had the chance. That and the fact I assume he’s not telling the truth about himself.

Romney is the everyman candidate. Every man (or woman) he meets, he claims to agree with. As David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, said in endorsing Romney, he’s “more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama.” He was soft on abortion as Massachusetts governor, unbending on the right to life when he needed Tea Party support, and soft again in recent weeks as he sought women’s votes. He was for universal health care as governor, produced the plan on which Obamacare is based, then as GOP candidate condemned Obamacare as an abomination and announced he’d repeal it on his first day. He boasts he’d be able to work “across the aisle” with Democrats to get things done, but pandered to Tea Partyists by signing a pledge never ever to raise taxes, even if offset by 10 times the amount in spending cuts, no matter what.

I have no idea which is the real Romney, the one who pledges to devote every waking minute to bettering the lot of the middle class, or the one who dismissed 47% of the country because they don’t pay federal taxes. The one who swaggered around vowing to get tough with Iran and Syria and labelled Russia the country’s greatest threat, or the one who spent 90 minutes of debate time with Barack Obama, agreeing with just about every foreign policy in the Democrat play book. The guy who sells himself as a Big Business Brain who can put the country back on the right course, or the candidate who keeps threatening to “get tough” with China, which holds a trillion dollars of U.S. debt and isn’t about to be ordered around.

Nope, he is decidedly a flip-flopper. Which, in a Washington seized by gridlock, means he might actually manage to get things done. I’m just guessing, but the impression I get of Romney is that he changes positions easily because, in most cases, he doesn’t really have a position. If he’s running a state that favours abortion, he’s OK with that. If he’d been running a state where abortion is viewed as murder, he’d have been OK with that too. He backed universal health care because folks in Massachusetts were sympathetic; but if Americans as a whole are opposed, so is he. The one area in which he appears to have a definite opinion is the economy, and he gives every impression of being willing to seek the fundamental changes that are necessary to remedy the ills that plague it. Fortunately, for him, that’s the issue at the heart of the election.

I don’t think the governor’s stated economic plan would work. You can’t cut taxes, disavow all revenue increases, increase spending on the military, cut only those programs that won’t cause any pain, and hope to make up the trillions of dollars involved by reducing tax loopholes and egregious deductions. As Obama says, the math just doesn’t work. Every Republican president since Reagan has vowed to cut spending, and failed. As Nicholas Eberstadt wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.”

Still, I’d vote for Romney, precisely because I think he’s capable of compromise, and I don’t believe anything will get done in Washington over the next four years without a sea change in the willingness to compromise. Barack Obama has done a credible job in his four years, given the catastrophe he was handed by the Republicans and the two years of deliberate obstructionism he’s endured from Tea Party forces. I doubt anyone could have done better. But Washington is a partisan battlefield in which opposing forces have fought one another to a standstill, and it’s likely to stay that way as long as Obama holds the White House and Republicans hold the House of Representatives. It’s a fate the country can’t afford. As Brooks notes, Republicans may not be enamoured of Romney, but they won’t want to be blamed for another Republican failure and will be under pressure to produce progress on the economy. Compromise and co-operation may not be guaranteed, but will at least become conceivable.

Romney may be a flip-flopper, but he’s not lacking skill or intelligence. He is a more accomplished and more promising figure than George W. Bush was, and has a wider range of experience. He seems unlikely to bumble into disaster, and gives the impression he’d be competent in times of crisis. A successful moderate Republican administration would also go a long way to curbing the cult of extremism and intolerance that is driving the party towards the fringes of political life. That in itself would be a welcome contribution to the reinvigoration of American life.